1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to document scanning and retention systems and more particularly pertains to a new intelligent medical chart capture system for scanning medical charts and discriminating between the size and type of documents in the medical chart without needing to manually separate and classify by type the documents in the chart.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 and similar privacy initiatives in Canada require hospitals and other health care organizations to effectively protect certain health data of their patients. Handling and accessing this health data in a paper-based format is labor intensive and inefficient. Protecting the health data in the paper-based format is also difficult to ensure that access is provided only to authorized personnel. These initiatives have dramatically changed the focus of medical records management in hospitals to finding methods for storing, retrieving and tracking access to data efficiently and effectively.
In addition, financial challenges to hospitals include pressure to contain or reduce costs and administrative space in favor of strategies and initiatives for improving health care. As a result, space in health care facilities is more valuable for patient care than medical record handling and storage. Storage of growing paper medical records poses challenges to Medical Record/Health Information Management departments to retain patient medical charts in a way that the chart can be quickly retrieved for medical care or patient review, while maintaining order in the handling of the records for billing purposes and ensuring chart completeness.
As hospitals strive to enhance patient care with electronic clinical care systems and systems that provide test data and results, managing paper charts has and will become increasingly difficult. The pressure to put into electronic form the medical forms and test results that currently remain available only in paper form (and thus as a paper portion of a patient's medical chart) increases as portals and integration among health care systems attempt to strengthen the usability and availability of the records.
The inhibiting factors to electronically capturing paper records efficiently for most hospitals include finding an efficient method in electronic systems for classifying forms of a medical chart as different document types, and managing access to the medical chart during the scanning process. The documents in medical charts are highly diverse, depending in part upon the type of visit (e.g., emergency room visit, scheduled appointment), the reason for the visit (e.g., type of injury, type of diagnosis), the department or departments of the healthcare facility visited by the patent, the types of health care services performed, etc. FIG. 1 of the drawings is illustrative of the variety in the makeup of a medical chart, with a chart including one or more documents and the documents including one or more pages, and the occasional loose document that is not a complete chart for a patient. More significantly, the variety of forms or papers that may make up each document of a patient chart can be enormous, especially in a hospital health care facility where there may be hundreds of different services provided and recorded in the chart. This significant variety in the form and content of each chart makes it exceedingly difficult to automatically determine the size (i.e., number of pages) of the documents in the chart and also discriminate between the type of documents in the chart being captured, and then electronically mark the separated documents and accurately identify the content for indexing and future retrieval.
Still further complicating any attempt to electronically capture and process medical charts in an automatic manner is the fact that the documents or forms used in one health care facility will typically vary significantly from documents used in other health care facilities, which makes it difficult to apply one solution across more than one health care facility. Yet another challenge to electronic capture is that the types of documents used will change over time, with some document types being added and some being eliminated. Further, the form and content of the documents within a document type will tend to change as variations are made and old forms are replaced by new forms.
One approach that has been attempted is to apply different bar codes to the different types of documents in a medical chart in order to facilitate document discrimination when scanning. However, the application, or integration, of bar codes to documents of a health care facility may require the changeover of the forms used in the facility. The expense associated with changing forms throughout a hospital or heath care facility can be very significant. The changeover process typically requires the printing of the new bar coded forms, distribution of the new forms, destruction of all non-bar coded forms, and retraining the personnel using the new bar coded forms. The expense associated with the changeover can easily be $400,000 to $800,000 or more for a large hospital. Further, it typically takes a hospital several years to fully implement bar-coded forms throughout the hospital. During that interim time period, the electronic capture of patient charts is either implemented at significant expense (since the records do not uniformly include bar-codes) or not implemented until a high percentage of the forms include bar codes. Another impediment to the implementation of bar-coded forms is the common administrative requirements for approving changes to forms, which are time-consuming and difficult to achieve. Still further, revision of pre-printed forms or software programs that generate forms can be cost-prohibitive for most organizations.
In these respects, the intelligent medical chart capture system according to the present invention permits a healthcare facility or health care system to implement a reliable electronic medical chart capture and recognition system without having to resort to manually separating and classifying by type the documents in the chart, and without requiring the revision of health care forms (such as by the inclusion of bar codes).